a)-the separation of religion from politics, such that political dissent can't be treated as an attack on God and thus worthy of all sorts of hideous treatment;

b)-a significant drop in the birth rate (admittedly a very long flash to bang on this one); and

c)-the widespread education and empowerment of women, which usually produces b) above

In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.

In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.

Bingo!

I thought George W Bush and the Project For A New American Century folks were wrong in so far as they thought they could wander about the world bringing liberal democracy to the masses. It took, arguably, 1,000 years for a few basic democratic elements to secure a real foothold in Northern Europe (500 CE to,say, 1500 CE) and 400 more years for something like real, liberal democracy to be relatively secure in most of Northern Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand.

(I did not think all of the PNAC aims were wrong, just the one about spreading democracy.)

There are, of course, other forms of democracy: conservative democracy which we find in e.g. Singapore, and, to a greater or lesser degree in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan; and illiberal democracy,* which is far more common than either or both of the other sorts.

It is ill that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults and wars; but it is worse to bring nations to such misery, weakness and basenessas to have neither strength nor courage to contend for anything; to have nothing left worth defending and to give the name of peace to desolation.Algernon Sidney in Discourses Concerning Government, (1698) ----------Like what you see/read here on Army.ca? Subscribe, and help keep it "on the air!"

This could go into a number of threads, but the idea there is a pool of 14 million displaced people and refugees (and the knowledge that this crisis actually predates both the Syrian Civil War and the "Arab Spring"; notice there were displaced Syrian farmers surrounding the cities before either of the other two events) suggests there is basically an unstoppable pool of recruits for radicals to fish from.

While the author rightly suggests that Iran's desire for regional hegemony is behind much of the crisis, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have done their share in spreading radical forms of Islam, pushing their own radicals out into the region and supplying and arming *some* radical groups as a way of fighting the Iranian influence.

This "thirty years war" is bound to spill out of the Middle East, and considering the current state of the world, with high levels of tension if not conflict in places that touch on the edges of the "Islamosphere" ranging from Sub Saharan Africa, Russia and China, this does not bode well for anyone:

14 Million Refugees Make the Levant UnmanageablePosted By David P. Goldman On September 8, 2014 @ 9:33 pm In Uncategorized | 32 Comments

There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population). When I wrote about the region’s refugee disaster at Tablet in July (“Between the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep“) the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others.

That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian farmers already were living in tent camps around Syrian cities before the Syrian civil war began in April 2011. Israeli analysts knew this. In March 2011 Paul Rivlin of Tel Aviv University released a study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture, widely cited in Arab media but unmentioned in the English language press (except my essay on the topic). Most of what passes for political science treats peoples and politicians as if they were so many pieces on a fixed game board. This time the game board is shrinking and the pieces are falling off.

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.

*strong language warning for video*

That is also why ISIS is overrated. A terrorist organization that beheads Americans and posts the video needs to be annihilated, but it is not particularly difficult. The late Sam Kinison’s monologue on world hunger is to the point: they live in a desert. They may be hard to flush out of towns they occupy, but they cannot move from one town to another in open ground if warplanes are hunting them. That is what America and its allies should do.

More dangerous is Iran, as Henry Kissinger emphasized in a recent interview with National Public Radio. Iran’s backing for the Assad regime’s ethnic cleansing of Syrian Sunnis set the refugee crisis in motion, while the Iraqi Shi’ites’ alliance with Iran persuaded elements of Saddam Hussein’s military to fight for ISIS. Iran can make nuclear weapons and missiles; ISIS cannot. If we had had the foresight to neutralize Iran years ago, the crisis could have been managed without the unspeakable humanitarian cost.

We cannot do the killing ourselves, except, of course, from the air. We are too squeamish under the best of circumstances, and we are too corrupted by cultural relativism (remember George W. Bush’s claim that Islam is “a religion of peace”?) to recognize utterly evil nihilism when it stares us in the face. In practice, a great deal of the killing will be done by Iran and its allies: the Iraqi Shi’a, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria. It will be one of the most disgusting and disheartening episodes in modern history and there isn’t much we can do to prevent it.

Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish - we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world - but we let our enemies write its moral code.

Persians make up about 51% of the Iranian population. they have the Kurds in the North and the Balachs in the south, who sit on much of the oil reserves. Neither Pakistan or Iran can afford a successful Balach independence movement. While Iran would survive, Pakistan would lose a large amount of land and it would encourage the Pastuns in the NWF to declare independence and possibly cleave a chunk off of Afghanistan as well. At which point a fragmented afghanistan might even lose a chunk including Heret to Iran.

The debate over how to think about Islamic State has mainly centered on important but abstruse questions -- is it evil or not? -- and on what combination of military and economic pressure might be necessary to prevent the establishment of a caliphate.

What the debate is lacking is a sense of history. And the historical antecedents do supply an early analogy to Islamic State -- a warrior people who came out of nowhere, defeated mightier forces in battle, accumulated wealth and, in their bloody ferocity, terrified every civilization with which they came into contact.

I refer to the steppe nomads.

The steppe nomads were fearsome horsemen of varying ethnicity who first encountered the great empires of antiquity around 700 B.C., and reappeared with regularity well into the Middle Ages. They lacked the sophisticated technology, wealth and professional bureaucracy of the great powers like Rome and China. Instead they had horses. Cavalry was something new, and the traditional empires had difficulty adjusting to the tactics of the unanticipated invaders, who although loosely organized slowly conquered vast swaths of territory.

Like Islamic State. As a matter of fact, back in the seventh century B.C., a group of steppe warriors, the Scythians, actually ruled a region roughly contiguous with the territory now controlled by Islamic State.

Ironies abound. For example, CNN has reported that the black robes and turban worn by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi intentionally “harken back” -- one assumes the writer meant “hark back” -- “to Arab rulers from 1,500 years ago." But if we go back that millennium and a half, to the era al-Baghdadi’s attire is meant to evoke, we find ourselves very close to the time when steppe warriors led by Attila the Hun came swarming into the remains of the Roman Empire, finally sacking the walled cities that had defied earlier invaders, because they had mastered the Roman technology. The Huns used battering rams and scaling ladders to take the fortified cities, and Attila spent his plunder wisely, hiring the finest engineers (many of them Romans) to figure out how to outwit the defensive technologies of the supposedly more advanced cultures of the West.

The story of the battle against the steppe nomads is powerfully told in Ian Morris’s excellent if controversial book, "War! What Is It Good For?" Morris, a historian and archeologist at Stanford, argues that there are two kinds of wars: productive wars that bring about greater prosperity and safety, and unproductive ones that are destructive to both. The wars with the steppe nomads were mostly unproductive. And although the territorial empires ultimately prevailed, the wars against the nomads were long and enormously costly.

By the 13th century, when Mongols under Genghis Khan successfully invaded what is now Iran, the technological sophistication of the steppe nomads had advanced considerably. Khan “employed a permanent corps of Chinese engineers,” writes Morris, and the engineers in turn forced prisoners to “dig tunnels; divert rivers; build catapults, rams, and towers; and rain burning gunpowder onto defenders." The Mongols’ use of technology helped them take Baghdad, “Islam’s richest city,” in 1258. A few years later, following a lengthy siege, the Mongols conquered Xiangyang in central China, “possibly the greatest fortress on earth.”

All of this was possible because the Mongols -- who began as classic mounted steppe warriors -- were far-sighted enough to see the advantage of using their accumulated wealth to hire the experts they needed to defeat the cultures of the West.

The Huns, another fearsome nomadic people, had earlier learned the same lesson. For the Hunnic Empire, writes the historian Peter Heather in "Empire and Barbarians," the “path to political triumph” was to take charge “of distributing the combined profits flowing from a potent mixture of raiding, mercenary service, and diplomatic subsidy.”

Islamic State has effectively checked off each of these boxes. The group has accumulated a great deal of wealth, and is spending a good deal of it on advanced technology, just as the Huns and Mongols did. Recent news reports suggest not only that the group now flies surveillance drones, but that the drones were used to study a military base recently captured by its fighters.

Islamic State has also captured a lot of sophisticated military hardware from the Iraqi army. Many experts are skeptical about the group’s ability to maintain or even learn how to use the equipment. Perhaps. But Islamic State doesn’t necessarily need to do maintenance and training on its own; it need only spend some of its wealth to hire outside experts interested in making a buck. It worked for the steppe warriors for centuries. There is no reason to think it wouldn’t work for Islamic State.

The steppe warriors lost in the end, of course. It cost the traditional empires of Europe and Asia dearly in blood and treasure, but they won. How? Morris lists several reasons, and all of them have relevance to the current threat of Islamic State.

Advancing technology -- particularly the discovery of military uses for gunpowder -- helped turn the tide of battle. So did constant and often massive attacks on the nomad territory, as well as simple bribery. Most important, perhaps, was a change in attitude. Not until they finally accepted their enemy for what it was, not a crowd of mindless barbarians but a powerful military and economic force that had to be fought with all the weapons and wealth at their command, did the great empires of history defeat the warriors of the steppes.

To contact the writer of this article: Stephen L. Carter at stephen.carter@yale.edu.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net.

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Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish - we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world - but we let our enemies write its moral code.

I'd like to put my 2 cents in and say that a "30 Years War" is exactly the opposite of what the Middle East needs. That would open up exactly the same Pandora's box as it did in Western society (materialism, related revolutionary bloodbaths in search of earthly utopia and mass secular ideologies far more bloodthirsty than anything that had preceded them), the effects of which we still haven't managed to shove back inside despite a breathtakingly naive assumption of success following a half century of secure democracy (a mere heartbeat in history). What the Middle East (especially Iraq and Libya) needs is a return to the only thing that kept them even remotely stable in anything approaching recent memory, that is to say, highly reactionary monarchies wielding an iron fist, whose absence allowed a power vacuum in which Islamic extremism (or pan-Arabist pseudo-fascism itself influenced by post "enlightenment" Western ethnic statehood) could thrive in the first place. Iraq and Libya don't need 1789. They need "l'état c'est moi".

Of course, such a thing would be ideologically unthinkable for modern Europe or the United States, who seem hell-bent on establishing a political and social order which has barely been tested in the West, let alone elsewhere.

Quote

In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.

I largely agree with this sentiment, and again I think the best solution to achieve these things (stability, a lid on jihadism and safety from an unwanted liberal society) would be the aforementioned reactionary monarchies. Complain all you want about the currently existing monarchies over there (not always cuddly teddy bears), but if all of the Middle East was a collection of UAEs and Saudi Arabias, we'd have a lot less to worry about.

Guess again. Al Quaeda was a product of Saudi Arabia. Iran is hardly a breeding ground for democracy but it is certainly a sponsor of anti-west terrorism and it has a stable dictatorship. ISIS did not emerge simply to combat Assad. These guys truly believe that the future belongs to Allah and you WILL bow or you will pay or you will die. The idea of religious freedom or the freedom to have no religion doesn't exist over there. Now that it ISIS has been let out of hell, we aren't going to find it so easy to push it back in again nor is it going to be easy to keep it in the Middle East. I would suggest that they have declared war on us and we need to come to grips with that thought and do something about it and now, while they are still squabbling amongst themselves would be the ideal time to act before they get their s***t together.

Guess again. Al Quaeda was a product of Saudi Arabia. Iran is hardly a breeding ground for democracy but it is certainly a sponsor of anti-west terrorism and it has a stable dictatorship.

I would say Al Qaeda is operating in spite of, rather than because of, the Saudi monarchy. Iran is a republican dictatorship, not a monarchy, and it just so happens to be an Islamic republic that appeared after the Shah was deposed, so hardly the thing I am advocating (in fact, pretty close to the opposite).

Quote

I would suggest that they have declared war on us and we need to come to grips with that thought and do something about it and now, while they are still squabbling amongst themselves would be the ideal time to act before they get their s***t together.

I'm not sure if you are addressing me directly with this, but I in no way implied that ISIS shouldn't be fought, in fact I think they should. I was simply arguing that trying to establish post 17th-century western society there is not the way to go, and not the thing ISIS should theoretically be replaced with once eliminated.

Actually I would say more like the Taliban, the forces that help create the ISIS had no idea of the success they would have and eventually the dog will bite the masters hands when it tries to control it. I am not sure how much technical help they will get in the long run, these guys are the like the scorpion on the fox crossing the river, they will kill the fox because it's their nature and will poison their own well with their nuttiness. In fact spreading lies and suspicion so they eat their own is a good way to fight them.

Gourdel was a 55-year-old mountaineering guide seized in northern Algeria

Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group have decapitated a French hostage after France carried out airstrikes in Iraq, according to a video that appeared online Wednesday.

French President Francois Hollande condemned the killing of Herve Gourdel and said France would continue its fight against ISIS group, which are Sunni militants that have taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

"Herve Gourdel is dead because he is the representative of a people — ours — that defends human dignity against barbarity," Hollande said, speaking along the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. "My determination is total and this attack only reinforces it. We will continue to fight terrorism everywhere."

A group calling itself Jund al-Khilafah, or Soldiers of the Caliphate, had said they would kill the French mountaineer after abducting him Sunday unless France ended its airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq within 24 hours.

France started airstrikes in Iraq on Friday, the first country to join the U.S. military campaign against ISIS fighters there.

France a special target for Islamic extremists

The killing of a hostage represents a departure for radical Islamic groups in Algeria, which in the past decade have made millions off ransoming hostages. France is also known for paying ransoms, though several hostages have died in the past at the hands of their captors.

In the video, masked gunmen from the newly formed group that split away from al-Qaeda's North Africa branch stood over a kneeling Gourdel. They pledged their allegiance to the leader of the ISIS group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said they were fighting his enemies. They added they were following his instructions to attack the French.

The video showed the captive pushed to the ground and blindfolded before he was beheaded.

Islamic extremists have long singled out France as a special target for multiple reasons: the French military campaign against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali, the French involvement in the NATO force in Afghanistan and French laws banning the Muslim face veil anywhere in public and banning Muslim headscarves in public buildings.

Nearly 1,000 French radicals have joined or are trying to join ISIS in Syria and in Iraq — more than the number of fighters from any other Western country. French authorities are particularly concerned that they will return and stage attacks at home.

The video resembled those showing the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker in recent weeks, but instead of starting with clips of U.S. President Barack Obama speaking, it showed Hollande.

The terrorism watchdog SITE Intelligence Group said the video had been posted on the social networking site Twitter. It was briefly available on YouTube before being taken down.

"Our values are at stake," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Wednesday after hearing about the video.

Taken during hiking trip in Algeria

Gourdel — a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice — was seized in the Djura Djura mountains of northern Algeria on Sunday during a hiking trip. His Algerian companions were released. On his Facebook page he had expressed his excitement about his camping trip and said he was looking forward to being shown around for a change, instead of being the guide.

The remote mountainous region, riddled with steep valleys and deep caves, however, is also one of the last strongholds of Islamist extremists in northern Algeria.

Algerian forces unleashed a massive search for Gourdel, sending in helicopters and special forces to comb the region.

According to a presidential aide, Hollande has spoken with his family. Gourdel's hometown in southern France is planning a vigil Thursday at the mountaineering office where he worked.

The head of a leading French Muslim group, Dalil Boubakeur expressed horror at the "this barbaric crime," condemning it "with the utmost energy." The group has called for imams to denounce the practices of ISIS.

Algeria has been fighting Islamic extremists since the 1990s. In recent years, they had been largely confined to a few mountainous areas, where they have concentrated on attacking soldiers and police while leaving civilians alone.

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ISTANBUL (AP) — Asiya Ummi Abdullah doesn't share the view that the Islamic State group rules over a terrorist dystopia and she isn't scared by the American bombs falling on Raqqa, its power center in Syria.

As far as she's concerned, it's the ideal place to raise a family.

In interviews with The Associated Press, the 24-year-old Muslim convert explained her decision to move with her toddler to the territory controlled by the militant group, saying it offers them protection from the sex, crime, drugs and alcohol that she sees as rampant in largely secular Turkey.

"The children of that country see all this and become either murderers or delinquents or homosexuals or thieves," Umi Abdullah wrote in one of several Facebook messages exchanged in recent days. She said that living under Shariah, the Islamic legal code, means that her 3-year-old boy's spiritual life is secure.

"He will know God and live under his rules," she said. As for the American bombs being dropped on the Islamic State group, she said: "I only fear God."

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DISCLAIMER: The opinions and arguments of George Wallace posted on this Site are solely those of George Wallace and not the opinion of Army.ca and are posted for information purposes only. Unless so stated, they are reflective of my opinion -- and my opinion only, a right that I enjoy along with every other Canadian citizen.

WASHINGTON (RNS) More than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world joined an open letter to the “fighters and followers” of the Islamic State, denouncing them as un-Islamic by using the most Islamic of terms.

Relying heavily on the Quran, the 18-page letter released Wednesday (Sept. 24) picks apart the extremist ideology of the militants who have left a wake of brutal death and destruction in their bid to establish a transnational Islamic state in Iraq and Syria.

Even translated into English, the letter will still sound alien to most Americans, said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, who released it in Washington with 10 other American Muslim religious and civil rights leaders.

“The letter is written in Arabic. It is using heavy classical religious texts and classical religious scholars that ISIS has used to mobilize young people to join its forces,” said Awad, using one of the acronyms for the group. “This letter is not meant for a liberal audience.”

Even mainstream Muslims, he said, may find it difficult to understand.

Awad said its aim is to offer a comprehensive Islamic refutation, “point-by-point,” to the philosophy of the Islamic State and the violence it has perpetrated. The letter’s authors include well-known religious and scholarly figures in the Muslim world, including Sheikh Shawqi Allam, the grand mufti of Egypt, and Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem and All Palestine.

A translated 24-point summary of the letter includes the following: “It is forbidden in Islam to torture”; “It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God”; and “It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslims until he (or she) openly declares disbelief.”

This is not the first time Muslim leaders have joined to condemn the Islamic State. The chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, for example, last week told the nation’s Muslims that they should speak out against the “terrorist and murderers” who fight for the Islamic State and who have dragged Islam “through the mud.”

But the Muslim leaders who endorsed Wednesday’s letter called it an unprecedented refutation of the Islamic State ideology from a collaboration of religious scholars. It is addressed to the group’s self-anointed leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and “the fighters and followers of the self-declared ‘Islamic State.’”

But the words “Islamic State” are in quotes, and the Muslim leaders who released the letter asked people to stop using the term, arguing that it plays into the group’s unfounded logic that it is protecting Muslim lands from non-Muslims and is resurrecting the caliphate — a state governed by a Muslim leader that once controlled vast swaths of the Middle East.

“Please stop calling them the ‘Islamic State,’ because they are not a state and they are not a religion,” said Ahmed Bedier, a Muslim and the president of United Voices of America, a nonprofit that encourages minority groups to engage in civic life.

President Obama has made a similar point, referring to the Islamic State by one of its acronyms — “the group known as ISIL” — in his speech to the United Nations earlier Wednesday. In that speech, Obama also disconnected the group from Islam.

Enumerating its atrocities — the mass rape of women, the gunning down of children, the starvation of religious minorities — Obama concluded: “No God condones this terror.”

Here is the executive summary of their letter:

1. It is forbidden in Islam to issue fatwas without all the necessary learning requirements. Even then fatwas must follow Islamic legal theory as defined in the Classical texts. It is also forbidden to cite a portion of a verse from the Qur’an—or part of a verse—to derive a ruling without looking at everything that the Qur’an and Hadith teach related to that matter. In other words, there are strict subjective and objective prerequisites for fatwas, and one cannot ‘cherry-pick’ Qur’anic verses for legal arguments without considering the entire Qur’an and Hadith.

2. It is forbidden in Islam to issue legal rulings about anything without mastery of the Arabic language.

3. It is forbidden in Islam to oversimplify Shari’ah matters and ignore established Islamic sciences.

4. It is permissible in Islam [for scholars] to differ on any matter, except those fundamentals of religion that all Muslims must know.

5. It is forbidden in Islam to ignore the reality of contemporary times when deriving legal rulings.

6. It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent.

7. It is forbidden in Islam to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and diplomats; hence it is forbidden to kill journalists and aid workers.

8. Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the right purpose and without the right rules of conduct.

9. It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslim unless he (or she) openly declares disbelief.

10. It is forbidden in Islam to harm or mistreat—in any way—Christians or any ‘People of the Scripture’.

11. It is obligatory to consider Yazidis as People of the Scripture.

12. The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universal consensus.

13. It is forbidden in Islam to force people to convert.

14. It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights.

15. It is forbidden in Islam to deny children their rights.

16. It is forbidden in Islam to enact legal punishments (hudud) without following the correct procedures that ensure justice and mercy.

17. It is forbidden in Islam to torture people.

18. It is forbidden in Islam to disfigure the dead.

19. It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God.

20. It is forbidden in Islam to destroy the graves and shrines of Prophets and Companions.

21. Armed insurrection is forbidden in Islam for any reason other than clear disbelief by the ruler and not allowing people to pray.

22. It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims.

23. Loyalty to one’s nation is permissible in Islam.

24. After the death of the Prophet, Islam does not require anyone to emigrate anywhere.

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We will continue to have groups like AQ, ISIS, etc, and we can fight it with bombs and bullets as much as we want, but we will never rid the earth of their barbaric ways until we allow reason to triumph and refuse to allow it anything but rational thinking (yes, instead of faith, because they are two polar opposites) to guide our way forward.

MANILA - A source from the military intelligence community identified over the weekend a Malaysian member of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) as one of the alleged ardent local-based sympathizers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

ISIS has seized control of huge territories in the Middle East.

The Manila-based intelligence source, who uses the code name "Pokemon" identified the suspected person as Amin Baco.

"The Malaysian Amin Baco or Abu Jihad has been in the country for a long period," Pokemon said, adding that this same person "had been involved in past bombing incidents in Basilan and Sulu."

(...SNIPPED)

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Our Country--------------------------------"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves." - Lao Zi (老子)-------------------------------------------"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."- Winston Churchill

Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) is a fairly wide spread Indonesia based terrorist organization in South East Asia. They have links to Al-Qa‘ida and other off shoots of Al-Qa‘ida. They have known associations with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

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DISCLAIMER: The opinions and arguments of George Wallace posted on this Site are solely those of George Wallace and not the opinion of Army.ca and are posted for information purposes only. Unless so stated, they are reflective of my opinion -- and my opinion only, a right that I enjoy along with every other Canadian citizen.

What is making it harder to figure out what is going on is the deliberate obscuring of the situation by the Administration to try to maintain the political narrative. Anyone ever hear of this group before?

The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist It’s a fictitious name the Obama administration invented to deceive us. By Andrew C. McCarthy

We’re being had. Again.

For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.

Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.

Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.

The who?

There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.

The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”

“Core al-Qaeda,” you are to understand, is different from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”). That al-Qaeda, don’t you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.”

Coming soon, “al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine.” In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if, come 2015, Obama issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through al-Qaeda in December.

Except you’ll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad. You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.

As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole — a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way.

For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict. For the Left, America has to be the culprit. Despite its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause. As you’ll hear from Obama’s Islamist allies, who often double as Democrat activists, the problem is “Islamophobia,” not Muslim terrorism.

This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists won’t disappear, it has to be denied and purged. The “real” jihad becomes the “internal struggle to become a better person.” The scriptural and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism must be bleached out of the materials used to train our national-security agents, and the instructors who resist going along with the program must be ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

The president has been telling us for years that he handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been telling us for weeks that the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda renegade that will soon reconcile with the mother ship for the greater good of unity in the anti-American jihad — is a regional nuisance that posed no threat to the United States. In recent days, however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly, tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth, were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading American journalists, and threatening American targets.

Obama is not the manner of man who can say, “I was wrong: It turns out that al-Qaeda is actually on the rise, its Islamic State faction is overwhelming the region, and American interests — perhaps even American territory — are profoundly threatened.” So instead . . . you got “the Khorosan Group.”

You also got a smiley-face story about five Arab states joining the United States in a coalition to confront the terrorists. Finally, the story goes, Sunni governments were acting decisively to take Islam back from the “un-Islamic” elements that falsely commit “violent extremism” under Islam’s banner.

Sounds uplifting … until you read the fine print. You’ve got to dig deep to find it. It begins, for example, 42 paragraphs into the Wall Street Journal’s report on the start of the bombing campaign. After the business about our glorious alliance with “moderate” allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar who so despise terrorism, we learn:

Only the U.S. — not Arab allies — struck sites associated with the Khorasan group, officials said. Khorasan group members were in the final stages of preparations for an attack on U.S. and Western interests, a defense official said. Khorasan was planning an attack on international airliners, officials have said. . . . Rebels and activists contacted inside Syria said they had never heard of Khorasan and that the U.S. struck several bases and an ammunition warehouse belonging to the main al Qaeda-linked group fighting in Syria, Nusra Front. While U.S. officials have drawn a distinction between the two groups, they acknowledge their membership is intertwined and their goals are similar.

Oops. So it turns out that our moderate Islamist partners have no interest in fighting Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate. Yes, they reluctantly, and to a very limited extent, joined U.S. forces in the strikes against the Islamic State renegades. But that’s not because the Islamic State is jihadist while they are moderate. It is because the Islamic State has made mincemeat of Iraq’s forces, is a realistic threat to topple Assad, and has our partners fretting that they are next on the menu.

Meantime, though, the Saudis and Qatar want no trouble with the rest of al-Qaeda, particularly with al-Nusra. After all, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch is tightly allied with the “moderate opposition” that these “moderate” Gulf states have been funding, arming, and training for the jihad against Assad.

Oh, and what about those other “moderates” Obama has spent his presidency courting, the Muslim Brotherhood? It turns out they are not only all for al-Qaeda, they even condemn what one of their top sharia jurists, Wagdy Ghoneim, has labeled “the Crusader war against the Islamic State.”

“The Crusaders in America, Europe, and elsewhere are our enemies,” Ghoneim tells Muslims. For good measure he adds, “We shall never forget the terrorism of criminal America, which threw the body of the martyred heroic mujahid, Bin Laden, into the sea.”

Obama has his story and he’s sticking to it. But the same can be said for our enemies.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

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Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish - we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world - but we let our enemies write its moral code.

Members who can might want to watch The Agenda[/'i] on TVO right now. The subjects are IS** and then Saudi Arabia.

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It is ill that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults and wars; but it is worse to bring nations to such misery, weakness and basenessas to have neither strength nor courage to contend for anything; to have nothing left worth defending and to give the name of peace to desolation.Algernon Sidney in Discourses Concerning Government, (1698) ----------Like what you see/read here on Army.ca? Subscribe, and help keep it "on the air!"

Yet another act of betrayal against one of the few groups which would be allies and supporters. No wonder no one trusts the *West* to keep their promises or live up to the rhetoric. If Canada is going to participate, then we need to identify who our allies on the ground really are and target our help to them:

Obama Betrays the Kurds The Kurds are fighting bravely, but they need arms, and they need air support. By Robert Zubrin

In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama pledged to the world that the United States would use its might to stop the horrific depredations of the terrorist movement variously known as the Islamic State, ISIS, or, as he calls it, ISIL.

“This group has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria,” the president proclaimed. “Mothers, sisters, daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.”

“No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions,” he said. “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death. . . . We will support Iraqis and Syrians fighting to reclaim their communities. We will use our military might in a campaign of air strikes to roll back ISIL. We will train and equip forces fighting against these terrorists on the ground.”These are brave words that well and truly denounce evil for what it is. Unfortunately, the president’s actions since then have been anything but consistent with his pledge to stop the terrorism.

As these lines are being written, some 400,000 Kurds in and around the town of Kobane in northern Syria, on the Turkish border, are being besieged and assaulted by massed legions of Islamic State killers armed with scores of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery. Against these, the Kurdish defenders have only AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Kurds have called on the U.S. to send in air strikes to take out the jihadist forces. In response, the administration sent in two fighter jets Saturday, which destroyed two Islamic State tanks and then flew away. The Kurds are begging for arms. The administration has not only refused to send arms, but is exerting pressure both on our NATO allies and on Israel not to send any either. Over 150,000 Kurds have fled their homes to try to escape to Turkey, but they are being blocked at the border by Turkish troops. Meanwhile, Turkey is allowing Islamist reinforcements to enter Syria to join the Islamic State, while Islamist elements of the Free Syrian Army, funded and armed by the United States, have joined forces with the group in the genocidal assault on the Kurdish enclave.

According to Kurdish sources, the Turks are massing troops on their own side of the border, with the apparent plan being to sit in place and allow the Kurds to be exterminated, and then move in to take over the region once they are gone. This is the same plan as Josef Stalin used when he allowed the Nazis to wipe out the Polish underground during the Warsaw rising of 1944, and only afterward sent in the Red Army to take control of what was left of the city. If anything, it is even more morally reprehensible, since it could be pointed out in Stalin’s defense that his forces were at least pummeling the enemy elsewhere while the Warsaw fight was under way. In contrast, the Turks are doing nothing of the sort. For an American administration to collude in such a mass atrocity is infamous.

If we are to win the war against the Islamic State, we need ground forces, and the Obama administration has rejected the idea of sending in any of our own. The Kurds, who have demonstrated both their bravery and their willingness to be friends with America, are right there, and already engaged in the fight. If supplied with adequate arms and backed by serious U.S. tactical air support, they could roll up ISIS as rapidly as the similarly reinforced Northern Alliance did the Taliban in the fall of 2001. Done right, this war could be won in months, instead of waged inconclusively for years.

The administration, however, has rejected this alternative, and has instead opted for a Saudi-Qatari plan to allow the Syrian Kurds to be exterminated while training a new Sunni Arab army in Saudi Arabia. Given the Saudi role in the new army’s tutelage and officer selection, the Islamist nature of this force is a foregone conclusion. At best it might provide a more disciplined replacement for the Islamic State as an Islamist Syrian opposition at some point in the distant future (current official administration estimates are at least a year) when it is considered ready for combat. Meanwhile the killing will simply go on, with the United States doing its part to further Islamist recruitment by indulging in endless strategy-free bombing of Sunni villages.

So now, to paraphrase the president, “Mothers, sisters, daughters will be subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children will be gunned down. Bodies will be dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities will be starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings will be beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.”

Surely we can do better.

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy​, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of The Case for Mars. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.

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Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish - we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world - but we let our enemies write its moral code.

Islamic State Influence Spreads Beyond Iraq and SyriaOct. 2, 2014 - 07:55AM | By NAILA INAYAT and KACI RACELMA, Special for USA TODAYLAHORE, PAKISTAN — In Pakistan, some are slapping pro-Islamic State bumper stickers on their cars and writing chalk graffiti on walls exhorting young people to join the terrorist group.

In China, the government fears that Muslim Uighurs — a restive ethnic minority in the country's far west — have sought terrorist training from the Islamic State to establish a breakaway country.

In eastern Mali, an Islamic State-affiliated group called "Soldiers of the Caliphate in the Land of Algeria" has taken over much of Gao province, inflicting severe punishments for breaches of the Quran, like drinking alcohol. Those militants beheaded a French tourist in Algeria last month after France refused to halt its participation in U.S.-led airstrikes against the group in Iraq.

"The situation gets more and more complicated as our region becomes the stronghold of radical Islamists who only use violence to express their will," said Mamadou Idrissa, a businessman in Gao. "Our life has turned into a nightmare."

(...EDITED)

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Our Country--------------------------------"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves." - Lao Zi (老子)-------------------------------------------"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."- Winston Churchill